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You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets.

The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people [...]

This is unfair - note that the comment you are referring to didn't specially mention police unarmed shootings of blacks, the comment was about disportionate policing and killings (which presumably includes, but is not exclusive to shootings of unarmed citizens). I mention this because police shootings are not the only manifestation of institutional racism. There are also unjust arrests, accusations, beatings (remember, Rodney King wasn't shot), convictions, and general mistreatment. You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.

As a relatively well-off, straight-laced black man, I'm not overly afraid of getting shot by police (although I think I got close to catching a bullet once), but I am terrified of a stop going bad in some way, not because of what I observed in the media, but because of my own personal experiences.

I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.

Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence

Absolutely true, and that reflects my feelings as well. But that is not the same as saying black communities trust police.

I agree with everything you're saying save for this:

> I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.

I understand there's a meme that exists about Black people needing to fear being murdered by the police. The entire point of my post is that, from a statistical point of view, this is almost as irrational as being afraid of terrorism, a plane crash, a shark attack, or being struck by lightning.

I was also focusing very narrowly on the topic of police killings of Black people, as you noted. I want to be very clear that I understand that Black people are victims of racism and socioeconomic inequality in other ways.

Yep. A lot of people who’ve been hurt by racism in the past, engage in loose pattern matching. If the story is a police officer shot a black person, to many it’s automatically racism, despite whatever the facts are.

That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie.

I was fortunate to grow up in California with two parents who could afford to send me to a private school.

Even absent more government intervention, just having more stable households will do a lot to fix the inequalities.

You raise a very important point and one that is difficult to discuss.

I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to leverage educational opportunities and had the stability of a supportive family.

When we talk about culture and the Black community, many people become understandably wary. It's a fine line between invoking culture and being seen to blame Black people for their own problems. Not to mention that, in doing so, it can be easy to lose sight of the richness of Black culture and its extensive contributions to so many aspects of the American experience e.g. in music, sports, entertainment, art, literature, and cuisine.

Perhaps a better way to frame it is that when a particular community has suffered so much injustice and attendant compounded stagnation, it's very hard to find an expedient solution to bring that community to parity that doesn't involve constructing fresh and even revolutionary internal narratives around achievement (and not just academic). Without that sort of effort, it might take many more generations for a combination of government intervention and the natural course of progress to fully remedy the imbalance.

And there's also the problem of exacerbating racial animus in the course of addressing that imbalance.

While I understand the need for it intellectually, I have substantial misgivings about preferential treatment being extended specifically to Black (or Hispanic or Native American) people along racial lines. There is something that feels deeply wrong about attempting to cure racial injustice by inflicting new racial injustices on people whose only fault was being born a particular race at the wrong moment in history, especially when we are purporting to be an enlightened society that has learned its lesson in this regard.

The position is unpopular with many here, but it is my opinion that we should not be devising a society that argues that a boy from an underprivileged neighborhood in Philadelphia is more deserving of opportunity than a girl from a disenfranchised part of the Rust Belt because he's Black and she's White. Rather, we should be saying that they are nearly equally in need of help from society because they are both disadvantaged. While this is not perfectly fair insofar as it does not factor in race, I believe it is a policy position that on balance would help the Black people who are most in need of it without leaving anyone of another race feeling as if (s)he's experiencing undue discrimination.

Unfortunately I believe that quandary is even more fraught than the issue of police killings and therefore at present resistant to the possibility of honest discourse.

A lot of words to explain away your racism.

A pretty poor response to a well written post. I'm skeptical you read through it.

Purely hypothetically, if there are string indications that parental socio-economic status influence the chances of their children. And that socio-economic status is somewhat (to strongly) correlated with previous race-influenced policies, is a generation or two of compensating for that "inflicting racial injustice"? Is a failure to compensate for it not explicitly "continuing racial injustice"?

I mean, I literally have no answer. Except, possibly, "yes" and "yes", and "the former is on the whole a lesser evil than the latter"?

> Purely hypothetically, if there are string indications that parental socio-economic status influence the chances of their children. And that socio-economic status is somewhat (to strongly) correlated with previous race-influenced policies, is a generation or two of compensating for that "inflicting racial injustice"? Is a failure to compensate for it not explicitly "continuing racial injustice"?

This makes two assumptions that I would challenge: that affirmative action as it exists at present is benefitting the most socioeconomically vulnerable underrepresented minorities and that the problem you're describing cannot be tackled with race neutral wealth redistribution and other need-aware policymaking.

Also, if you want to go down the racial grievance accounting rabbithole, then the Irish, Japanese, Jews, etc would like a word as well. You're be hard-pressed to find a race that doesn't have some such claim.

I am specifically NOT trying to go down "redress historical grievances", only "try to correct for currently existing imbalances".

There's probably also something to be said for having policies trying to get some geographic rebalancing in place as well. But, what I am trying to say is that redressing recent-past wrongs MAY require slight over-compensation.

To make anything other than sweeping generalisations, I would need numbers. Oh so many numbers.

This is a good survey that shows the impact of availability bias on people's perceptions about this topic:

https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Rep...

The problem is that when you sign up for a tribe, you experience an emotional obligation and social pressure to adopt its beliefs wholesale, even if that means jettisoning rationality along the way.

This is an affliction that beleaguers both sides of the aisle.

There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.

https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f...

The suggestion that there is some significant number of police killings that are going unreported - especially in the environment of the past several years - is categorically conspiratorial thinking. It fails the barest of sanity checks when you consider just how 'deep state' an effort would be required for that to be conducted at scale.

Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.

EDIT: Poster changed the link and added a comment. The below is a response to the modified comment.

> There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.

Sure. You can look at the total number of police killings and not only are the numbers still shockingly low as a percentage of arrests and encounters, but there is also no overt sign of an extraordinary racial bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de....

> The suggestion that there is some significant number of police killings that are going unreported - especially in the environment of the past several years - is categorically conspiratorial thinking. It fails the barest of sanity checks when you consider just how 'deep state' an effort would be required for that to be conducted at scale.

> Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.

Axios is one of the most credible outlets to both the GOP and the Democrats. Then-WH spokesperson Sarah Sanders has praised Axios as a worthy outlet.

The Raza database just looks at newspaper reports for deaths by police. There is no nationwide standard for how police deaths should be recorded.

You are the one suggesting bizarre conspiracy. A nationwide conspiracy of local newspaper outlets reporting deaths.

There are organizations dedicated to trying to ascertain the error in reported police shootings. They have found what is logically self-evident but that you refuse to accept: no reasonable suspicion of outsized error.

> A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,104 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata

And I will once again reiterate that the suggestion that there are some great number of police killings going undetected in the present highly charged environment is itself a crime against reason.

No, sounds like you’ve fallen for the spin. Not the other way around.